2 Wheel addiction

Its been a while since I wrote in my blog and thought I should give everyone a update as to what's been going on, could be a bit long. First thing is my longtime girlfriend Lindsay and I have purchased a home in Burien about 10 miles outside of Seattle. That has been alot of work to get moved. Plus, I like to cram some additional things in there for fun, 6 hour endurance race and a 114 mile bicycle race this Sunday up to Mt St Helen's.

Getting ready for the 6 hour endurance race consisted of a complete bike tear down and rebuild. Earlier in the year Jake Frame and myself had a frame from one of the other bikes extended to allow more fuel. Buell is a unique bike with the fuel in the frame rather than on a standard motorcycle. The capacity is down a bit with it being in the frame so we were able to customize it a little to get us some additional capacity for racing endurance. Jake picked up Jeff Wieand's stock XB9R racebike and brought it over to the house and we began the week long process of getting it ready. We took the bike to Adrenaline Freaks track day there at Pacific Raceways on Friday to get the bike sorted out and let Jake ride a Buell for the first time. With it being a stock motor he was still pretty impressed with it and loved the way it handled in the corners. We had some issues we had to work out through out the day but was able to get it all sorted and ready to go. Jake also has a 190 horsepower Honda Fireblade 1000RR that he had at the track as well. I have never rode a Japanese Inline 4 cyclinder above 600cc's. I told Jake several times that I didn't want to ride it because I was scared of it. What do they say about peer pressure and never give in to it? Well Jake came in after running a few laps and rode up to the pit and said get your stuff on, your riding this beast, then proceeded to take off to the track again. He came back around a few minutes later and there I was with all my gear on! I wanted to ride it but man was I nervous. I got on and got the pre flight debriefing and off I was. As soon as I got on the straight away I opened it up and man o man that was weird, the power delivery was scary fast. I still flogged it though coming out of corners, short shifting it like it was the Buell. After a couple laps I was getting more and more comfortable on it and was able to get it up to 10,500 rpm which equates to about 165 mph on the front straight. I came in and the professional photographer that was there gave me some sh$t about riding it like a girl, Jake joined in on the fun too. I felt pretty good about how I rode it. I didn't care what anyone said. I just rode a super fast bike for the first time in my life and was able to ride the bike back in one piece. Don't get me wrong the Buell is fast but only has 115 horsepower.

The race on Sunday started out bad as it was raining and we were late getting our tire changed so we started 2 laps down. Jake went out for the first stint on the bike and lap after lap he got faster and faster. At the 30 minute mark it was pouring down rain and Jake was still out there. Now the normal tank on the Buell is 3.6 gallons and on a standard motorcycle (Honda, Suzuki, etc) is 4.8 gallons. The custom frame we had made probably got us to the 4.0+ gallon mark. At the 40 minute mark Jake had moved us up to 6th place out of 11 teams. We kept expecting him to come in for fuel as most of the teams now had already made a fuel stop but he stayed out there. At the hour mark we heard on the corner worker radio that the Buell was having problems. Jake was coming down pit lane with the bike still running so he was running out of gas on the back side of the track but was able to get it back to the pits. We filled it up and Pete Ross (another Buell racer) jumped on board and took off. Talk about getting good gas mileage, Jake went a hour with out pitting and that put us up to 5th place and then Pete moved us up to 4th place before he came back in 10 minutes later with motor problems. It was a downer for sure for the motor to break like that. Especially with all the time and effort everyone put in to get us up to 4th place overall. We did finish 3rd in the heavyweight division and got a trophy. That was the good thing and we were able to bring something back to Downtown Harley Davidson Buell who spent the money to get us to race and who really put in the effort to support us.

In between all of this crazyness of moving, yard work, taking trailer loads of garbage, and building a endurance bike I thought it would be a good idea to sign up for a 114 mile race/ride up to Mt. St. Helens. I haven't been training to seriously since the STP (Seattle to Portland) but have been riding a few times a week and on the weekends. In between moving and getting the bike built I have been squeezing in some bicycle rides so hopefully I will be ok for this ride on Sunday. It has over 7500 ft of climbing and you have a time limit of 10 hours to complete. I am pretty confident I should be able to finish under the time limit but you always have that doubt of your body crackin on ya.



Take care and until next time.



Brad

P.S. Big thanks to Downtown Harley Davidson Buell for all the support and getting behind our racing effort. Check them out at http://www.downtownhd.com/
To get more information about us racing click on bikes, racing.